Shumer Asks for Rule Review on Facebook Practices

Senator Charles Schumer of New York has asked the FTC to design privacy rules for social networking sites, including clear guidelines on how information submitted to sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter can be used and disseminated. While Schumer acknowledges that these sites provide a great new way to communicate, he reminds us all that "as these sites become more and more popular, it's vitally important that safeguards are in place that provide users with control over their personal information to ensure they don't receive unwanted solicitations. At the same time, social networking sites need to provide easy to understand disclosures to users on how information they submit is being shared."

His pleas for this review seem well-timed as Facebook is now providing user data to select third-party websites and has begun sharing personal profile information to which users previously had the ability to restrict access. (Yet another reminder that if you haven’t looked at your Facebook privacy setting lately, now would be an excellent time to do so.) It will be interesting to see how the FTC responds, but clearly we all need some help with the privacy setting on these accounts as they get more convoluted all the time, giving Facebook, Google, Twitter and others more liberty to disseminate personal information, more freely, without consent.